Posted
by
kdawsonon Tuesday October 10, 2006 @02:39PM
from the hello-we're-here dept.

eldavojohn writes, "Yahoo is compiling a time capsule (Flash required). This massive project, which accepts donations from anyone, is no ordinary time capsule, though. This time capsule will be digitized and beamed into space from the ancient pyramid of Teotihuacan in Mexico. From the article: 'Starting on Tuesday, enthusiasts from around the world will have a chance to submit text, images, video and sounds that reflect human nature to be included in the message.' I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea. After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us — if not for anything else than curiosity. We constantly strive to have our legacy live on in the galaxy." Yahoo worked with Internet artist Jonathan Harris on this project.

I highly doubt this 'time capsule' will reach anyone, but it is a neat idea.

No this is not neat>, this is just stupid. This is so incredibly stupid it's left me speechless... nearly:

So they're going to beam it into space via a laser from atop a ruin from a vanished civilisation. Are they going to rotate this
laser to maintain RA and DEC, to keep it as one continuos beam or will they just fire it straight up (for maximum theatric effect) and
thus have it whipped by the spin and orbit of the earth? Carl Sagan's record has a better chance. It's an opportunity for Yahoo to do something utterly useless to get
their name in the news, just like it now appears on Slashdot. Applause, applause. It certainly is fodder for some
comedy, maybe Mel Brooks will have someone in Spaceballs The Animated Series say, "what is that annoying glare?" while flipping down
their pair of Spaceballs The Sunglasses.

meanwhile, picked up in orbit, the stream is immediately recognised and decoded by a Zygorthean ship. After reviewing the contents, the focus down upon the
the pyramid of Teotihuacan and one says to another, "well, we certainly know what killed that civilisation!"

I don't know... It could be a massive legal ploy. Since they will undoubtably send music (In DIGITAL form no less), they can draw all the RIAA lawyers to an Aztec Pyramid. Hopefully, the will re-instated human sacrifice at that point!

The guy has a point. A laser beam pointed straight up will sweep at _incredible_ speed over any receptor situated a couple of tens of lightyears from here. Even if that civilization were looking this way at the right time, had receptors strong enough for the task, had the luck of not having the beam blinded by our or their sun's light (there's a reason we have trouble detecting even Jupiter sized planets by their reflected light, which is higher than this laser will send), etc, it's something that will sweep over their sensor in milliseconds. At most you can say "oh, there's a bleep of light", but not even "oh, it's modulated". Much less have time to figure out what's being sent or how to decompress it.

And speaking of which, ffs, who got the stupid idea of sending encoded images? How about something as simple as morse codes, or train of pulses whose count are the prime numbers or Fibonacci's numbers? That's something that any civilization with even elementary maths knowledge and a primitive telescope can figure out quickly. "Hey, this can't be natural!" By comparison, a short faint burst of noise (which is what an alien data format would look like to you too) is likely to be written off as noise or as some unknown one-off cosmical phenomenon.

I'd argue that there is a possibility that it is more than a publicity stunt, but rather an overall attitude of not only American, but human sentiment in general.

Someone once answered the question about why people do the things they do in a way that makes sense, why we are so different from the other animals. "We know we die," she said, "and most of what we do is primarily motivated by this knowledge. I believe that honestly comes into play h

Being that your version of life will end, never to be seen again, is it just not worth it to dream? Should Columbus never have used selfish motive? Or Magellan? Each had a 1 in a million shot by earthly standards at the time. After all it doesnt matter in the scope of things, they should have just stayed at home and drank themselves to oblivion in the pub.

What about the worlds largest cookie, absolutely absurd, but fun to do anyway.

No. Just no. See, the world is full of idiots doing something stupid and pointless. Those are a dime a dozen, and comparing them to people like Columbus or Magellan is just insulting to the latter category. The ones who changed history, e.g., Columbus or Magellan, weren't retards doing publicity stunts, they were people who put some solid thought into what they were trying to do.E.g., Columbus's calculations might have been wrong, but he started from solid evidence that the Earth must be round. The idea tha

In your cynicism you blot out hope, dreams, and just plain silliness just for the hell of it.

You act as if acknowledging these truths makes you somehow want to sit in a corner and cry about it. Perhaps that is how most people feel. I find these truths to be liberating. If nothing you do ever really matters to anyone except yourself it gives you the freedom to do the things you really want to do. Now maybe for most people that's murdering and pillaging and whatever, but for most normal people it is simp

However, you can dream all you want but the remarks I've made are true. To not deal with them is to not deal with reality.

Very few people ever actually deal with reality. It's too harsh.

I have long since come to the conclusion that in some part of most humans' minds, this knowledge MUST be blocked out - to KNOW that in the end, everything that we will ever know or ever dream will fall to dust, would paralyze and immobilize most people. Merely getting through a single day requires not thinking about the

I think we understand each other well. Cant disagree with you, I was just pointing out that our lives are our own. What we wish to do with them us up to us. Would I be a better person for acknowledging my insifigance? I guess that would depend on whether or not it would bring happiness. Should I benefit society? Or just myself, what if, in bettering society I lead a fulfilling life? What if my dream is to send a nonsense capsul into space? In my opininon, children have it right in life. We dont

Even if it was beemed with are spin taken into account, it still has all thr other spins to account for.OTOH, a race capable of picking up sucj=h a weak signal might also know to look arounf the initals 'blip' and look for more blips. 5 blips and you ca calcualt how the signal mover and back track it to the sourse.

Sure, it's a stunt, and while it isn't likely to happen, it's fun to think about.

encoded images have a patterns. Of course the signal itself can have the method to decode the signal 'embedded'

I agree this idea is stupid. Even more annoying to me, though, are the
categories they are asking for - love, hope, anger, sorrow, beauty, etc.
- with no category for scientific information. I would think that 99%
would be meaningless to an alien species. If I intercepted an alien
transmission, the first thing I'd wonder is what new knowledge it
encodes. If they had their Yahoo equivalent sending out their version
of this, scientists on earth might spend decades or centuries struggling
to decipher the m

IANAA(lien), but I'd quicker beleive an alien society could share visual or audio abilities with us than lingual ones. Decoding images seems more reasonable than having to learn morse code AND the language it is in.

If you gave an alien a photo, yes. But if you give them a signal encoded with some proprietary lossy compression? Heh.

The problem isn't the photo. The problem is that you get a stream of 1 and 0 and you have to figure how the fuck to even make heads or tails out of it. Before you'd get a photo to

It's probably best that this garbage doesn't make it out of the galaxy. Every category is whining and bitching about things that don't describe humanity with any usable context... crying about relatively small current events, with geographic locations and politicians referenced by their proper names.

Archaeologists say a culture centred in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse.

The History Channel did a show on this- and suggested it was a lack of fuel & food (based on the fact that Teotihuacan is in the middle of a small mini-desert, which itself is in the middle of a jungle).

It was also disease from the Europeans. Same thing that killed much of the rest of the other Native Americans, just more effective in Teotihuacan and other cities because disease spreads faster in denser populations.

Except- the original inhabitants of Teotihuacan abandoned the city in approximately 300 A.D.- long before the Aztecs, about 700 years before Europeans discovered Newfoundland. The mystery is in that original evacuation of the city, not the later Aztec renaming of Teotihuacan and die off in 1500.

It was also disease from the Europeans. Same thing that killed much of the rest of the other Native Americans, just more effective in Teotihuacan and other cities because disease spreads faster in denser populations.

I'm sure that's what they teach in Revisionist History class in politically correct schools these days, but it doesn't hold up.
Teotihuacan collapsed a thousand years before the first European arrived there.

Yeah, because there's evidence in that pyramid that the aliens who built it used digital communication also...Maybe it would be easier to communicate, albeit more expensive, if we shot up a big rock with stuff written on it, say maybe 10 rules that we consider important? I can't imagine that would be misinterpreted somehow by an early desert people on another planet.

There reaction depends soly on their nature. Hopefully it's benevolent.If it is hostile, then as our last act, I hope we put something long lasting on the moon that tells the next race about our folly.Or even a very large orbit around the sun. Maybe attached to the Halley's Comet so we can nhide it from the incoming hostil aliens.

Of course, the odds of there being aliens, that can travel through space in a reasonable time, and stumbly upon this messa

After browsing through some of the pictures posted, I would hope extraterrestrial life would be more hesitant to exterminate us -- if not for anything else than curiosity.

Lord Emperor, the Imperial Armada has exterminated the last of the hydrogen-band spammers. At last we can enjoy a reliable communication infrastruc... wait a minute, WTF is this coming from ZZ9 Plural Z-Alpha!?

Someone at yahoo misunderstood the context when they heard that "TCP/IP protocol is univesally adopted everyone supports them". Yahoo, please sit down, or you might hurt yourself. Those real Klingons and Vulcans and Deltans are not likely to "get" the communication protocol.

Something like this was proposed in the David Gerrold novels of his Dingilliad [gerrold.com] series. The sum total of human knowledge was constantly being shot around the solar system on a laser beam that bounced off of various retroreflectors on the different planets. If you waited some finite amount of time (an hour or so) for the next pass of Item X, anything you wanted could be siphoned off of the stream by setting up a telescope receiver and picking up part of the "spillover" laser beam that hit your colony location but missed the retroreflector. This dynamic "storage medium" was used at the time of the story instead of a "static medium" like physically immobile hard drives or memory chips.

As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?

As I recall, Gerrold presented some mumbo-jumbo that said the storage capacity of such an arrangement - a billions-of-miles-long laser beam - was truly enormous. Sounded like a pretty good idea. Anybody think it would really work - and better yet, be practical?

It does sound like an intriguing idea. Some of my thoughts on the subject:

In order to maintain a constant signal strength, each receiver/transmitter would need to "boost" the light signal, presumably by adding a beam of light of its own. The spillover

Assuming that a retroreflector is something which amplifies the signal (otherwise it fades quite fast), the maximum number of bits you could store is equal to the frequency of the signal in hertz multiplied by the total round trip time of the signal in seconds. If we call that a 75THz signal (maximum of visible light) and a 24-hour round trip around the whole solar system, that's about 10^20 bits, or ~1000 petabytes? Not bad.

I collect donations, you guys. Here's my plan:1. Collect massive quantities of information2. Record them into expensive as hell piece of hardware3. Throw it out in space and lose it forever

I swear it makes a hell of a sense!

Honestly. Let's see what we have here to communicate with unknown being from outer space. No really, let's ignore that those artifacts will never really hit anything remotely alive out there (hey the Universe is really huge you know? And most of it is just empty space).

You know, maybe it's just me, but if I was composing a message that would be sent out to the Universe, available to entities on billions upon billions of worlds, I would at least run a spellcheck before hitting "Submit."

The DRM implications of beaming stuff into space are enormous. Will the aliens have the right media player and license? What if the DRM expires before the beam is received? If teens can't pay for MP3s on Earth, how will we collect money from aliens? What happens if I accidentally contribute copyrighted music - will the RIAA sue the aliens? What if the LCD screen on the time capsule cracks?

Archaeologists say a culture centred in Teotihuacan, known as the City of the Gods, dominated Mesoamerica for hundreds of years during the first millennium. It is unclear what led to the society's collapse.

It would be a good way to keep alien invaders out. It would be like saying 'nothing to see here, move along'. If aliens see how primitive our computers are, they would definitely think again about visiting us.

I would have suggested DNF, but by the time it will be out, we will deliver the goods to the aliens ourselves.

Perhaps that's the true genius of it... The aliens will have to register with Macromedia to download the plug in and that's how we'll make alien contact! After that we'll defend ourselves against any hostiles with blasts of spam and junk faxes.

I, for one, welcome our dangerous yahoo spam-browsing alien overlords. I have complete trust in their honesty, and know that only they will be able to assist me in liberating my late father's hidden fortune from Nigeria.

You have a point there.I can see it now:1.Images and music files end up on alien P2P network- RIAA and MPAA go batshit, sue aliens, start intergalactic war- ALL of them against Earth.2. Romulus, not having latest version of flashplayer (they are running Romulinix), get paranoid that it is secret invasion plans, makes first strike.3. The Vulcans- instead of seeing Cochran's warp signiture get spammed with OMGZ!!!!11!PINK PONIES and Goatse.cx, turn tail and first contact is instead by 1 and 2 above.4. The G'o